Lossless Audio Files To Play On iPhone

I know of two apps that are able to play lossless audio files on iPhone:

- FLAC Player
- GoldenEar

Each have its unique features:

FLAC Player only plays FLAC, but it includes an equalizer with lots of presets.

GoldenEar plays FLAC, APE and some other loss-less audio formats. It does not have an equalizer.

So far in my testing, GoldenEar seems to handle CUE sheet better. Given a FLAC file and a CUE sheet, it represents the FLAC file as an album (just as expected), and individual tracks are correctly recognized as songs. FLAC Player, on the other hand, does not seem to recognize CUE sheet in my testing. A FLAC file is played like a song without splitting out individual tracks.

Both apps plays FLAC well. While GoldenEar also plays APE, it did have some problem play one of the APE files in my testing. The beginning 1-2 seconds of the file sounded like skipped and broken. It seems the app is lagging on trying to process the file. The rest of the file plays fine.

Since FLAC Player seems to be more advanced in playback due to its cool equalizer, it would be a waste if the problem with CUE sheet and other loss-less formats (like APE) prevents us from using its full potential.

One way to go around CUE sheet is to extract individual track on a computer, and then copy the FLAC of individual track to FLAC Player. A free tool called CUETools can do this pretty well. Use the CUETools.exe to accomplish this.

APE files can be converted to individual FLAC tracks using foobar2000.